Jenga was just one of many games and experiences I tried out last week at Meta’s Reality Labs headquarters in Burlingame, California. I stretched my face in a way that would shame Jim Carrey as I tested the eye-tracking and facial expression features. It was surreal to see a green elfin character, my avatar, mimic these expressions. I deliberately broke virtual toys. I scribbled notes on an imaginary notepad.
I got lost in painting a messy masterpiece even though I was fidgeting with the brushes. Then I hung the virtual painting on a lifelike wall. In theory, squeezing your fingers to pick up objects in VR is great. In practice it takes … practice. When I tried the painting app, I also had to try it on three different headsets, because of what was described as the earthquake effect: the software faltered and shook, and virtual paint cans would be scattered around the room.
I was taking a live DJ class from a real DJ, even though that person was posing as an avatar (just like I did) and was somewhere completely different, spinning turntables on what might as well have been another planet. Florida? London? Who knows. I used clumsy precision pinches to turn the knobs and push some faders on my own virtual DJ mixer. The purpose of the demo wasn’t to test my DJing skills or even my interest, but to show what social presence would feel like in a live VR tutorial. Likewise, in an app called Woorld-two Os is a typo and three Os is an app name, the creator told me – I was standing next to a friendly avatar named Paul while we played a game based on Google Maps. The app would drop us off somewhere, anywhere, in Europe. Using context clues and virtually traversing the Google Street View map, we had to guess where we were. I really enjoyed this.
The last demo of the day was of Meta’s own app, Horizon Workrooms, which is currently in beta. This felt the most forced of all the VR apps I’d tried that day, in that it tried to mimic common workplace interactions in VR and relied heavily on that concept of social presence, though everyone again like a cartoon. presented. Navigating a breezy virtual meeting room — even if the background is Aspen-esque — and hitting a virtual Post-it on a virtual whiteboard for my virtual friend Jordan to comment on doesn’t feel like a big improvement over sharing. a Google doc on 2D screens.
Horizon Workrooms lets you cast three virtual monitors right in front of your eyes, which is great if you don’t have the money or space to use three physical monitors at your desk. But the solution for a keyboard is to overlay a virtual keyboard over a real keyboard, which didn’t match up perfectly in my experience; or to let you look under your headset to just use the real keyboard. At that point, I was relieved to take off the Meta Quest Pro.